The present invention relates to techniques for collecting financial information for one or more individuals.
Existing financial-software applications, such as accounting applications, financial-planning applications, and income-tax-preparation applications, typically operate by collecting financial information associated with one or more customer or user accounts. For example, a customer may have one or more: bank accounts, credit card accounts, and/or investment accounts (such as brokerage accounts). After collecting this financial information, a financial-software application may use the financial information for various operations, such as determining profit and loss, producing financial forecasts, and/or preparing income-tax returns.
Unfortunately, existing financial-software applications typically require users to provide details for each account during an initialization or setup operation. Thus, for each account a user may need to provide account information, such as: an account number, an account type, a provider name, a provider address, a provider telephone number, a routing or access code, user identification, and/or credential information (e.g., a password). Assembling and providing all of this account information is a time-consuming, error-prone process. Furthermore, many users are reluctant to provide credential information because of the possibility of misuse.